Crippled CEO Blog #160:
Last week, I declared without any reservations that the the choice of who you surround yourself with was the single most important decision you make in your life.
Shockingly, seven days later, I still agree with this.
Perhaps the second most important thing, though, is how you spend your time. We all only have so much time to be alive. I am aware that I have less than a lot of people, so I may think about how I spend my time more acutely than others.
For instance, I famously refuse to do showers of any kind – bridal, baby, golden, or otherwise. I don’t enjoy them. So, I refuse to attend them.
I recently read an interesting tactic of labeling the events we have coming up, with the goal of getting a sharper resolution image of how enjoyably we are using our minutes and hours.
The idea is to look at all of your planned events coming up, and with as little thought as possible, label each one as “Get To”, “Want To”, “Have To”, and “Should Do” (something you, other people, or society think is important).
If you have a lot of Have To and Should Do — more than Get To and Want To — something is wrong.
And even if you don’t, reducing the number of things we aren’t excited about doing still makes sense.
The first place to start is with the Shoulds. Chances are, you could drop many of those entirely with far less negative fallout than you think.
After that, the Have To’s. There are certain things that we have to do, and there is no way around that.
However, I think we often conflate Have To and Should Do.
People told me that I HAD TO attend my only nephew’s first birthday party. And… I didn’t. Because I don’t attend birthday parties for little kids who aren’t going to remember the party ever happened. Maybe I SHOULD have, but I certainly didn’t HAVE to.
So, spend some time being real honest with what is actually a Have To and not a Should Do in disguise.
Sometimes, Have To’s can be reframed or adjusted so they can be upgraded. Two nights ago, I got to see the comedian Jo Koy at the FTX Arena in Miami.
I was very excited to see the show, definitely a Get To event, but I was not happy about the trek to Miami.
I recently saw Kevin Hart at the same location. The drive, and especially the nightmare that was the struggle to park our vehicle, almost made the entire thing not worth it.
Jo Koy: Get To. Driving and parking in Miami: a dreaded Have To.
So, I hired someone to do the actual driving. For a relatively small amount of money, he drove us down there and dropped us off at the arena, allowing us to totally sidestep the entire parking fiasco.
For the drive itself, instead of thinking of it as this thing I had to do in order to get to the show, I reframed it as an opportunity to hang out with my amazing friends for 90 minutes each way — people I treasure spending time with and talking to. I GOT to do that on the way there and back, and it was great.
With one actual modification that removed the most painful portion, combined with a change in my perspective, I turned a Have To into a Want To. This isn’t always possible, but if you’re on the lookout for ways to make it so, the opportunity is there more often than you might think.
Life is too short to spend more of it than we have to doing things we don’t enjoy. And there is the opportunity cost! What could we have done with that time instead? Even if you don’t replace a canceled plan that you didn’t want to do with something amazing, at the very least, you can now stay home to watch Netflix or have orgasms (or both).
(Do you know what I GOT to do last night? Your mom. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.
Did you know that I have a YouTube channel now? I do! I am putting up two videos every single week. Go search for Crippled CEO and you’ll find me. I would appreciate it if you subscribed.)
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